


perennials

by donttouchthebombs13



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Casual Ableism, brief mention of attempted suicide, brief mention of physical abuse, description of a manic episdode, description of depression, internalized ableism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-31
Updated: 2015-07-31
Packaged: 2018-04-12 07:39:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,669
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4470875
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/donttouchthebombs13/pseuds/donttouchthebombs13
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>the winter has been harsh, but they have only ever known how to keep growing</p>
            </blockquote>





	perennials

**Author's Note:**

> fun fact: the working title for this was "EAT HTE H ELL"  
> anyway i started thinking about mabel having adhd and then them going to college and things got out of hand, so, sorry.  
> (im not sorry tho)  
> summary was inspired by the poem "generation gap" by madeline c. - shes an a++ writer and yall should check out her blogs - mythaeolgy and vespairs on tumblr  
> EDIT**  
> okay i reworked this after a lot of help from the amazing cleromancy. he's a fantastic author and y'all need to go check out his work !!!

When Mabel is four years old she is coloring, and through the din of her preschool class, she hears her teacher on the phone as she nervously twists a wedding ring around her finger.

 

“ _Yes, of course I broke up with him. I can’t believe you’re still pushing this_.”

 

“ _Him_ ,” Mabel knows, is her teacher’s boyfriend. The word feels heavy and serious on her tongue, and she’s drawn to the way her teacher talks about him like he’s a secret.

 

She hears things like that a lot.

 

She isn’t supposed to, she’s learned. If she tries to bring it up she gets yelled at, put in time out. They accuse her of spying and it fills her with righteous anger because you said it in the middle of the room for everyone to hear.

 

She has not yet learned that she is different - she has only ever heard of “ADD” from kids with older siblings and no filter. She hasn’t learned that her peers do not view a loud classroom as a vicious onslaught, that they do not notice every single conversation, do not pick up on every mood and tone. She assumed this was how everyone lived their lives, and felt vaguely inadequate for not being able to act like everyone else in spite of it.

 

The first time she hears it in relation to herself, she is in second grade, in a parent-teacher conference with her parents on either side of her like guards.

She speaks up when she hears it, says, disgusted, “ _No!_ I’m not _special ed_!”

 

(She does not know what those words mean - not really - but she knows she hears disdain in the teachers voices when they talk about them, a mix of pity and disgust that makes Mabel’s stomach churn, and she will not be one of them, _she won’t_.)

 

She hates her teacher when he says, “It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” because how could he say that when Mabel heard him just today complaining about “these hyperactive brats”?

 

 _He might have been talking about me_ , she realizes.

 

Tears are welling up in her eyes, and she calls him a liar, and runs out of the classroom, and runs and runs.

 

Dipper comes after her, tries to comfort her, and she hates him for it because Dipper’s conferences are never like this. Dipper’s teachers hand their parents shiny brochures and say, “Your son has an extraordinary mind,” and “Have you ever had him tested for our Gifted and Talented program?”

 

(Mabel’s teachers tell her parents that she’s “energetic” and “always willing to try,” and she had taken pride in this, even when a smug-faced boy at recess told her that teachers only said that about kids who were stupid. This is the first time Mabel has ever considered that he might be right.)

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Things get better when they move in with their uncles: Dipper no longer has bullies that have spent their summers dreaming of new bruises they could give him, and Mabel does not have to hear people refer to them as “the smart one and the other one.”

 

So things are better but they are not easier. On bad days Mabel still hears things from two classrooms over and how can she be expected concentrate on calculus when the girl in the next classroom is asking her best friend to go out with her? How?

 

Dipper has seen his sister as _protector_ since they were three years old and she punched the boy that tripped him during arts and crafts. Now his chest tightens when he sees her, fists balled, eyes watery, try desperately to work out a chemistry equation.

 

He tries very hard to help her, and he does help, but they process things so differently. Dipper seeks out patterns and routine with the skill of a trained investigator. Mabel find beauty in randomness and has never really believed in rules that she didn’t understand.

 

And so some days Mabel will come home school in tears, snaps viciously at anyone who tries to talk to her, hates herself because _she can’t do this_. She’s not smart, and her peers know it, and her teachers know it, and it hurts so much to be known as _Dipper’s stupid sister_.

 

 _Don’t I know the words to this song?_ Stanley thinks when he hears this, and he ignores her protests and drags her out for root beer floats. They’re sitting on a brick wall, and Mabel is avoiding his eyes, running her fingers over the soft, thick moss that coats the grout.

 

“Sucks, doesn’t it?” he asks.

 

“What?” She knows what, and she will still not look at him.

 

“Having those nerds for brothers.”

 

She laughs, surprised to find humor in it. “You love him.”

 

“Yeah,” her uncle says reluctantly, “but you love yours too.”

 

They talk for a very long time. No one had ever heard of ADD when Stan was in school, and as he listens to his niece describe how she hears everything, how she jumps from one thing to another without being able to control it - without realizing it, even - Stan feels something click inside of him and thinks, “ _oh_.”

 

They come back and Ford and Dipper aren’t sure what happened, but when Stan says to Mabel with a light voice and serious eyes, “Normal is overrated,” and Mabel smiles, they find they don’t really care.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

So things are still hard, but they’re better, and Mabel comes home one day with a spark in her eyes and paint under her fingernails and suddenly going to school isn’t as daunting anymore.

 

To no one’s surprise, Dipper takes every Biology class their school offers, and he and Ford spend their nights peering at cells through high powered microscopes.

 

Mabel spends her high school years taking ceramics and art history and AP art, relearning how to love herself. She spends her nights walking through town and the woods, looking for inspiration (and trouble, occasionally – Stan sometimes regrets telling her about how he saved Ford and himself from a werewolf with a pair of brass knuckles and a left hook).

 

Art supplies and microscopes don’t come cheap, however, so they spend their weekends working at fast food restaurants (and hunting monsters, because, well,  some things never change).

 

Their interests slot together surprisingly well – Mabel uses Dipper’s knowledge of chemistry to help her improve the quality of the cheap paints she can actually afford, and the little things Mabel notices about the monsters they fight come through in her paintings, which saves their lives more than once.

 

(“What do you mean you never noticed that?” she says to her brother, only slightly smug, when she points out the way a Gremloblin’s hair will turn pale gold right before it attacks.)

 

By the time they are handed their cap and gown, they are known as the salt and pepper twins - a moniker they both learn to live with.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Mabel stays after school one day to go over her portfolio with her art teacher, and smiles when her teacher asks her where she came up with the creatures she’s painted, black, spindly creatures with eyes of golden light, and hulking bull men with foaming mouths. “Just wandering around,” she says.

 

It is the end of her senior year and she has a feeling she won’t get another chance, so Mabel thanks her, tells her how art was the first thing that made her feel still and balanced. The world around her faded to a quiet, fuzzy grey as she carefully mixed colors and applied them to smooth canvas. She gives the teacher a tight hug and walks out without seeing the tears that have gathered in the older woman’s eyes. Mabel’s art teacher sends her portfolio to a few of her professor friends, and letters marked “Mabel Pines” from art schools across the coast start to flood the mailbox.

 

Dipper’s AP Bio teacher is, as luck would have it, a Bigfoot enthusiast. He and Dipper get into in-depth discussions on the existence of Bigfoot, and the validity of local folklore. He’s never met a student like Dipper before – equally invested in the legend and the biology.

 

They are discussing this one day, the divide between local legends of magic and the known realm of true biology. “Why can’t they coexist?” Dipper asks him, only a little bit challenging. “We used to think that lightning and the pull of the tides were magic, too. There are things on this planet that are like, millennia older than humans are. Isn’t it arrogant to act like not being able to explain something means that it doesn’t exist?” His eyes seem very old for a seventeen-year-old boy.

 

The teacher presses a small stack of college brochures in Dipper’s hands one day, says, “I’m friends with some of the professors in their biology departments - you should be hearing from them soon.”

 

The mailman has to start coming to their door because he can’t fit all of their letters in their box.

 

After three months of fighting, tears, and a visit from, as Mabel put it, “a certain chip-shaped asshole,” the twins pick their colleges, which are on opposite sides of the country.

 

Both of the twins seem to be nervous about it, but Stanley and Ford don’t really know how to help them – this was never something they had to worry about, never something they had to deal with.

 

(Right after his father threw him out of the house, Stan thought that he would give anything, _anything_ , to worry about that. He watches the twins hover around each other anxiously on the days leading up to their separate flights, and suddenly he isn’t so sure.)

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Despite being a country away, Stan and Ford still get letters and phone calls from both of them, but Mabel doesn’t mention Dipper and Dipper doesn’t mention Mabel.

And, well. Stanley and Ford don’t know what to say about that. And neither of them are good at dealing with things like this, so they don’t say anything, and keep their looks of worry to themselves.

 

Their first holiday back from school and the twins come in from different airports. Ford is practically vibrating with excitement to talk to Dipper about advances in cryptozoology since he’d been gone, and Stan misses hearing Mabel’s horrible jokes more than he’d like to admit, so pick up duty is assigned easily.

 

Stanley catches sight of Ford’s truck pulling into the shack just as he is, and before he can blink Mabel has launched herself out of the car and is yelling “Dipper!” and Dipper is mirroring her. Mabel swings him around (she turned out taller after all – alpha twin indeed), and suddenly they are speaking so fast that Stan isn’t entirely convinced they’re speaking English.

 

They hadn’t mentioned each other, Stan and Ford later learn, because they spoke almost every day with over their computers (Mabel mentions something called “Skype,” and Stan isn’t a hundred percent sure that it’s an actual mode of communication).

 

Mabel comes home with shy stories about a philosophy major who has soft blonde curls and brown eyes, who reads Nietzsche and tells her she’s that she’s different than other girls, that she makes him feel alive.

 

(She comes home during spring break with a black eye and bruised wrist and bloodied knuckles. When they ask her what happened, her shoulders tense and she says, “It turns out that the only way he could feel alive was to make me feel like I was dying. He didn’t like it when I made him stop.” Stan sees red but he bandages her knuckles carefully and has never been more thankful that he taught her how to box.)

 

Dipper doesn’t come home with stories of romance, but he facetimes almost daily with a girl in his microbiology class who has curly black hair and loves aliens and has a laugh that makes him feel like he’s home. When he turns around to find his  sister smiling like she just won the lottery, already dreaming up ways to torment him, he wonders if he was fated to have the worst luck in the world

 

* * *

Dipper ends up in the hospital his sophomore year, and he still has Mabel as his emergency contact when she’s on the other side of the country. She gets the call at four in the morning and is on a plane at seven, hastily typing emails to her professors as she boards. She finds Dipper with the curly-haired girl next to him (Mabel learns her name is Sabrina, and the bright smile she greets her with makes Mabel love her instantly), talking in soothing tones. He’s too skinny and his eyes are so tired and they don’t have their usual spark and it takes everything Mabel has not to cry.

 

Dipper tells Mabel about how he just got so _tired_ suddenly, how he couldn’t bring himself to eat or go to class or shower, how all he could do was curl up in bed and sleep, but eventually he couldn’t even do that. He’d taken the pills to help him sleep, he says, somewhat sheepishly adding that he “hadn’t really accounted for dosage.”

 

(Here’s a secret that Mabel will take to her grave: she is never sure if she believes him.)

 

Mabel stays with him for a week, alternatively camping out in his hospital room and Sabrina’s couch. Dipper drives her to the airport after making an appointment with a therapist and promising to call her if it gets bad again.

 

Mabel ends up in the hospital her junior year. Dipper walks into her room to find her unconscious, hooked up to a dozen machines and breathing through a tube. For someone who has had more near death experiences in his two decades of existence than most have in their lives, he has never felt more like he was suffocating. He shakes hands nervously with the girl at Mabel’s bedside (Charlotte, a literature major with a soft voice and dark skin, who looks at Mabel with hearts in her eyes). She tells Dipper Mabel was hit by a car, but is being treated for other things too.

 

Mabel does not wake up for three days (the longest of Dipper’s life – his uncles can’t afford to fly up to be with them, and he gets five calls a day from them just so he can say _no, nothing’s changed_ ). During those three days, Charlotte tells him haltingly of what “other things” meant. She refused to go in-depth.

 

“It’s Mabel’s life,” she tells him with surprising stubbornness, “and it has to be her choice to tell you everything.”

 

Dipper, who has been wary of all of Mabel’s partners since the philosophy major, finds himself relaxing around her completely after that.

 

Lately Mabel went through periods of frantic energy. “Mabel’s always energetic,” Dipper tells her.

 

Charlotte shakes her head. “Yes, but this was different.”  

 

Mabel wouldn’t sleep, and one night Charlotte woke up to find her on the roof in the freezing cold, looking at the sky and smiling widely

 

“Look at them, Char. Can you see them? Do you even know they’re there?”

 

Charlotte felt like she was treading water. “You can show me, if you want,” she said helplessly.

 

Mabel looked at her with sad eyes before turning her gaze skyward.

 

“She was buzzing with energy, all the time. When she had an idea for a painting she would ignore everything until it was finished,” Charlotte says.. “She wasn’t eating, barely  went to class., If she got stuck she would just leave and wander around in the middle of the night.”

 

It was during one of these sleep-deprived nighttime wanderings that she got hit by the car.

 

She had been brought to the hospital on a Sunday night, and Wednesday morning she wakes up Dipper, who had been curled up stiffly in a chair next to her bed, to blearily ask for pancakes. They haven’t been religious for a long time, but Dipper thinks back to the prayers he learned at his sister’s side in a crowded temple, mumbles them under his breath when he’s ducked out of the room.

 

He leaves a few days later. When Mabel hugs him before he goes through security, he says, “Call me if it gets bad again, okay? Promise.”

 

She rolls her eyes. “I guess I can’t expect a biology major to have the creativity not to copy my loving goodbyes, but I _guess_ I promise anyway.”

 

“Okay. I love you.”

 

“I guess I love you too. Nerd.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

They grow up. They fight, almost lose each other, make up, and swear never to fight again. Until the next time.

 

Mabel experiments with wild hair dyes and undercuts, but never stops loving dresses and girly things.

 

In Dipper’s junior year he meets a boy who makes his heart stop and his head go fuzzy, and when he kisses Sabrina it feels like he’s kissing a friend, not a lover.

 

After a month of inner turmoil he tearfully breaks up with Sabrina, apologizing the whole way through. She smiles at him, wipes the tears off of his cheeks, and when he asks her if they can still be friends, she laughs and says “We _better_ be, you dork.”

 

(He doesn’t yet know it, but he will be the best man at her wedding in 5 years when she marries her roommate - she will lovingly punch him when he makes a joke about mutual beards, and he will respond with his best impersonation of Scully saying “Sure. Fine. Whatever.”)

 

Senior year, he works up the courage to introduce his family to a pre-med student named William, who becomes Mabel’s best friend after discovering their shared love of Ducktective and Marie Braquemond.

 

Since they’re both up to their eyebrows in their theses, senior year is the least Dipper and Mabel have talked to each other, well, _ever_.

 

Mabel’s is half essay, half exhibit, focusing on art as an outlet for people with learning disorders. She talks about how both public school, and her own college, has failed to make art accessible for the very people most likely to need it. She has to defend her position fiercely against professors who were never taught to hate themselves at seven years old. However, Mabel has always been persuasive, and when she walks out of the room (undismissed, with no goodbye. She fights to keep her hands from shaking and tries to pretend she’s Elizabeth Bennet), she has shared the fire she spoke with to the professors who listened.

 

Dipper’s thesis is about the importance of local folklore in the understanding of the biological makeup of cryptids. He is as passionate as his sister, and twice as well researched, but having people so much older than him stare down and tell him that the creatures he’s talking about don’t exist makes him feel twelve years old again. He’s thrust back to his first summer in Gravity Falls, seeing evil and danger around every corner and not being able to convince the grown-ups to help him. He sputters and gets furious, and they dismiss him like a child.

 

“You’re idiots,” he tells them, before he can stop himself. “You’re so terrified of what you don’t understand that you dismiss anyone who tries to show you what’s hiding in the dark. Eventually, though, it will be too late. You won’t be able to hide anymore, and you won’t have anyone there to tell you what to do. You’re so busy cowering behind ‘real science’ that you’re holding the rest of us back.”

 

Before Mabel has finished telling her family what happened with her presentation, she’s getting calls from her professors, promising her TA positions if she agrees to come back to them for graduate school, and Stanley and Ford are fiercely proud of her.

 

Dipper’s summer is filled with calls to universities that go ignored, and rejection letters to graduate school. Calling your thesis panel idiots gets around, it seems. He tells his family what happened with balled fists and watery eyes. Stanley and Ford are fiercely proud of him too.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Their first night back, Dipper and Mabel sit on the roof together. Wendy’s perch, which seemed luxurious and spacious when they were twelve, is cramped now, thanks to long limbs and a bottle stolen from their uncles’ liquor cabinet. They can see the woods, their trained eyes and ears sensing the magic in it that others can’t see.

 

Midsummer means clumps of light dancing in the trees, faeries gathering bones and wheat and late flowers, insulating their homes for the coming frost. It means busy gnomes harvesting mushrooms and berries to eat during winter. The air around them seems to buzz with magic, all of it right in front of them. _How_ , they think, _could anyone not see that?_

 

“I can’t believe I fucked up this badly, Mabel,” Dipper tells her softly.

 

She is on guard for the signs that he’s losing himself again, but he doesn’t seem empty. Just confused.

 

“Fuck them,” she says simply. “You were right. They’re a bunch of old rich dudes who haven't ever bothered questioning the world around them. Dudes like them are the reason people thought the world was flat.”

 

“But you aren’t supposed to _say_ that! At least –” he sighs. “At least not like I did.”

 

He takes a swig from the bottle, but makes a face and puts it down.

 

“Fuck what you’re supposed to do,” Mabel says. She loops her arm through his and rests her head on his shoulder. “Normal is overrated.”

 

Soft cricket chirps mingle with the eerie faerie songs, filling the air with tiny bells. The air around them is warm and moist. Small shoots of grass with tiny purple flowers are growing, even up on the roof, between their fingertips.

 

Mabel plucks one gently, and before Dipper notices, it’s tucked securely behind his ear. She smiles at him, and he can’t stop himself from smiling back.

 

They grow up.

 

They move on.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> so i based the descriptions of adhd/depression/manic episodes on my own experiences so obviously they don't speak for everyone's experience of it  
> hmu on tumblr at montparnah if u wanna talk gravity falls/su/etc  
> the kudos button is your best friend  
> 


End file.
